Wikisource:Authority control

This page describes the concept of authority control and how it can be used at Wikisource to link our works, authors and portals to external resources in a consistent and reliable manner.

Authority control is the the practice of creating and maintaining index terms for bibliographic material in a catalogue, and is particularly useful for assigning unique identifiers to people, works or subjects. When applied to Wikisource, it means maintaining links to a set of standard external catalogues.

Below is a list of authority controls which can be used on Wikisource, along with example identifiers and links to the corresponding database entries. Different authority controls are appropriate to different namespaces.

VIAF combines authority data from a range of around 20 authority files and libraries around the world. It is very useful as a starting point when researching authors.

Because VIAF is a record aggregator, it is particularly vulnerable to split records when one entity has multiple records from different databases. In this case, use the record with the LCCN and report the split record to VIAF.

Authority data on persons from the United States Library of Congress have a control number of the forms below (alphabetical prefix, followed by a 2- or 4-digit year and a 6-digit serial number). The second format is the format used in Wikisource templates, as the parts are combined in various ways for various purposes. The number is split into the parts with "/" and leading zeroes are removed:

WorldCat is operated by the OCLC and can be linked to in several ways, for example by ISSN, OCLC, LCCN identifiers. Use of the WORLDCAT parameter will override the automatically generated link. Always appears at the end of the authority control list.

Authority control identification numbers can be found on the respective website associated with the authority controls. For example, searching the Library of Congress catalog is a good way to find a correct LCCN. Some sources provide links to other authority control but many do not.

There are two main sources that can provide more than one authority control ID:

Of these, VIAF, as an authority control aggregator, will provide the most IDs in one place. WorldCat will often provide, for authors, the LCCN and VIAF numbers and, for works, LCCN and OCLC numbers.

For works sourced from the Internet Archive, some authority controls can be found on a linked website, Open Library. The link to this is the "editable web page" in the line "This book has an editable web page on Open Library" on the Internet Archive. The Open Library page will often list authority control IDs such as LCCN and OCLC as well as its own Open Library ID.

Authority controls are also used with Wikisource's sister projects, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. It is possible that some authority control IDs have been added to appropriate page on those projects. They can usually be copied to the Wikisource page without alteration.

There is an optional gadget available to make it easier to add authority control data to a page, using data on VIAF. To activate this gadget, go to the gadgets section of your preferences, check the box with the description "Add a toolbox link to select and import a variety of authority control data from VIAF" and save. This will add a link in the toolbox in the sidebar.

When clicked, this will create a specialised search function based on the page being viewed. If the search is not performed automatically, simply click the search button. More than one result may be shown, so it may be necessary to investigate the results to see which, if any, are correct. If the correct result is not found, it may help to alter the search terms (possibly adding or removing middle names or other details) and searching again. If results are still negative, the page may not have any matching authority control IDs registered with VIAF.

Authority control links can be added on Wikisource, which will override information held on Wikidata, but the best practice is to keep all data centrally at Wikidata where it can be used by not only this project but all Wikimedia projects.

The exception is the VIAF link.

The presence of a VIAF link on Wikisource should indicate that the data has been checked and verified by a human being on this project. Uses of {{authority control}} without a VIAF link imply that the data is currently unverified as far as this project is concerned.

The following maintenance tracking categories should show the current state of VIAF links on this project.